None of the Above

 

In college, I took several competitive tests, some with serious intent and others just for the heck of it. Most of these used to consist of multiple-choice questions. While it was fun attempting most of these tests, one thing that invariably perturbed me was the option – None of the Above.  It not only caused confusion, it also restricted me from smart-guessing answers to numerical problems, particularly where the speed of response mattered a lot. One thing that I learned while hiring candidates in my organization was that we should know what the candidate knows and not what he doesn’t know. Therefore, many years later, very recently, when I was setting up the question paper for my MBA students in a college, I made sure that there was no option for NOTA.

The mischievous NOTA has continued to hound me years later as well. Despite all the articles that I have read and all those videos that I have watched from contemporary psychologists on women's psychology, I have continued to commit mistakes. These psychologists warn that when your wife complains about something, it is not to seek a solution from you. You just need to listen and appreciate the challenges. Unfortunately, I have built and lived through my career by finding solutions for my clients and therefore, the very same natural instincts that helped me build my career have repeatedly failed me at home.

Very often, my wife would run out of ideas for the evening meal. As she would grumble about it, the solution provider inside me would come with multiple options. I would rattle out options of Paneer, Aloo-Matar, Lentils, or Sambar. And, lo and behold, she would dismissively pick the NOTA and would end up making Kadhi-pakora. I will have no problems with the option but just that not meeting up to the challenge would sometimes hurt the solution provider in me.

When it came to buying a gift for someone, she would seek my suggestions. Acknowledging the NOTA risks, I would generally refrain from making any concrete suggestions. But my wife had worked for long in the corporate world.  And like a pro manager, she would remind me that one of the traits she liked in me, before our marriage, was my choice of innovative gifts. And I, like an overzealous software developer, would jump into my solution mode. But all my suggestions of bouquets, clothing, gadgets, and curios would finally end up the NOTA fate.

But as the much-cliched adage goes, every cloud has a silver lining. I am sure, at some point, my wife would have been presented with a list of suitors by her parents for her marriage. And instinctively, she would have responded with a NOTA. And then, as I approached her directly, with the sole and solitary option, there was no space for a NOTA.